{"id":194,"date":"2011-09-27T19:52:18","date_gmt":"2011-09-27T23:52:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/?p=194"},"modified":"2011-09-27T19:53:08","modified_gmt":"2011-09-27T23:53:08","slug":"194","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/?p=194","title":{"rendered":"Punk Steamery"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This is a painful thing, because I like well-done steampunk, and I sense a coming backlash for the genre. Based on a few recent movie releases, I wonder if Hollywood is to blame for the backlash, as they are to blame for so many other things, because of a weird insistence on tacking watered-down steampunk (I&#8217;m not sure if that is a good description, given that watering down something that is steam-powered would just add fuel, but leave that aside for a moment) into every movie that is set before 1940. Take Jonah Hex:<br \/>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/_l0zSd_DQQ4?rel=0\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Jonah Hex went through some ups and downs as a comic book, but for a while there it was a cracking good western\/horror thing. Jonah didn&#8217;t have a gadgeteer sidekick and twin horse-mounted Gatling guns, because he didn&#8217;t need them &#8211; he was all magic and occulty and such. But of course you need technology for explosions, the crutch of the lame filmmaker.<\/p>\n<p>But this looks like it will be even worse, if possible:<br \/>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/mQd3MwT2fAM?rel=0\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>The scary thing is that I knew within seconds of seeing the beginning of the trailer for the first time that I was going to be treated to a lame steampunk wanna-be, because some variation on the pistol-grip crossbow is an absolute necessity for those too lame to even lean on explosions. But good God, <em>Three Musketeers<\/em>?\u00a0 Can&#8217;t you be satisfied with swashuckling without tacking on gratuitous gunplay, flamethrowers, and things blowing up?\u00a0 I guess you&#8217;d need to be confident in your ability to choreograph a sword fight to be satisfied with that.\u00a0 And let&#8217;s face it, great chunks of bullet-time slo-mo is not the hallmark of a director confident in his ability to film an action sequence.<\/p>\n<p>There are plenty more examples out there of tacked-on steampunk gadgetry, but frankly the prospect of searching for trailers of crappy action movies is too depressing.\u00a0 Anyway, the point is not to complain about lazy movie-making, but to complain about the fact that lazy movie-making may be screwing up books.\u00a0 I&#8217;m sure there is a certain market saturation for steampunk as it is, but I have to think that having the Three Musketeers and Sherlock Holmes running around in airships shooting proto-machineguns is accelerating the whole process.\u00a0 Which is a pity, because I really wanted to jump on that bandwagon.<\/p>\n<p>Finally, as an apology and palette-cleanser for that Three Musketeers thing, enjoy the sword fight scene from Rob Roy:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/BEtPluUi0_U?rel=0\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is a painful thing, because I like well-done steampunk, and I sense a coming backlash for the genre. Based on a few recent movie releases, I wonder if Hollywood is to blame for the backlash, as they are to blame for so many other things, because of a weird insistence on tacking watered-down steampunk [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-194","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-writing-things"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=194"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}